The Ones You Love

People you love
build a small house for you,
cover the dirt floor with hay,
hook a long chain to the cowhide
that circles your throat,
fix the chain to a stake in their yard.

In the day, the cut grasses hear you howl;
at night, they make a nest for your body.

You go nowhere.
You could lie down and die,
but someone wants you kept alive,
a cheap security system.

Years of this and then one full-moon night,
suddenly you hear them —
the motley wolf-coyote clan.
They’re calling
from the far side of the creek,
and you’re answering.

Break the chain, they say,
and you do.

– Harriet Ann Ellenberger, October 2014

Genesis and Aftermath of “The Ones You Love”

A hundred years ago, farmers had shot the last wolf in New Brunswick. All up and down the eastern parts of North America, it was the same: no wolves in the woods, no wolves anywhere.

But a tiny remnant of the eastern wolves had found refuge in Ontario’s Algonquin provincial park, and when coyotes from the southwest migrated that far north, the Algonquin wolves accepted them into the pack, mated with them, and taught them wolf culture. The result was the eminently adaptable coywolf, or bush wolf, who has since repopulated much of the land where the eastern wolf was killed.

Coyotes arrived in New Brunswick many years ago, but only within the last three or four years have wolf-coyote hybrids been sighted. This past July (2014) is the first time we have seen a timber wolf streaking across the back lawn, headed for the treeline. And in August 2014, the man delivering gravel for our driveway told us that where he lived, near the Maine border, wolves, coyotes, wolf-coyote hybrids, and runaway guard dogs were forming a new kind of pack that included all of them.

It was out of this rapidly shifting reality that “The Ones You Love” emerged.

A few weeks after writing the poem, I noticed something unusual about it: everything, even the “dead” grass, is alive and interconnected and communicating, with the exception of the humans who chained the dog. They too are “alive,” but cut off from the symphony of be-ing that surrounds them.

Without intending to, I’d written an animist poem, suffused with the consciousness of ancient humans. And that’s when it belatedly dawned on me that the wolf-coyote clans in my neighbourhood are influencing, not only their close relatives, but me too.

Break the chain, they say; break the chain to that alienated/amputated modern-human “world” you know so well.

Re-enter the fullness of the world, they say; rejoin the children of Earth.

I don’t altogether know how to follow their most excellent advice, but I’m working on it.

note: “The Ones You Love” with its accompanying postscript was first published in “Return to Mago” on 20 January 2015, and then reprinted in She Rises: Why Goddess Feminism, Activism, and Spirituality (Mago Books, June 2015).

Thank you for the beautiful poem and for the wonderful news of Wolves coming back. I’d been hearing rumors…and I love Sara’s coyote picture. I guess that must have been taken during the cold snap last year, judging by all the porcupine quill-like ice crystalling around its head.

Oh good, thanks so much for the description, “a powerful pull toward freedom” is exactly what I feel here when a lone wolf calls in the night from somewhere in the back woods, or coyotes or wolf-coyote hybrids call to each other at night. I almost want to be them.

Fantastic, wondrous, pure animal participation. Living in Greece I see far too many dogs in this exact situation as “cheap security system” and it makes me boil while wanting to weep. I will always appreciate this poem as a real moment of liberation that every single one of us needs, more than we realize.

Thanks, Jack … Barbara Mor especially liked “The Ones You Love” too. It seems to strike different people in different ways — one friend of a friend became very angry when she read it, saying, “is this a poem about animals or people?!”